User talk:Pigsonthewing

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This user is one of the 300 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

Talk to me, Andy Mabbett

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Seasons Greetings!

Hello there, 'tis the season again, believe it or not, the years pass so quickly now! A big thank you for all of your contributions to Wikipedia in 2024! Wishing you a Very Merry Christmas and here's to a happy and productive 2025! ♦ Dr. Blofeld 08:53, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #658

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2024-12-16. Missed the previous one? See issue #657

Discussions

• New requests for permissions/Bot: PWSBot - Task(s): Is a selfmade chatbot to answer factual questions as part of a final research project for educational purposes.
• Closed request for permissions/Bot: CarbonBot - Withdrawn by submitter

Events Upcoming events:

• Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group session (Attn: Please fill out Pre-Participation Survey!) 17 December 2024: We have our next LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group Session on Tuesday, 17 December 2024 at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6 pm CET (Time zone converter) Wikimedian Mahir Morshed is leading a series of four sessions focused on lexicographical data in Wikidata. We are looking forward to learning more about these Wikibase entities! If you anticipate attending the workshop sessions, please fill out a brief survey linked from our Series Etherpad to help us prepare relevant materials for you. Sessions will be held on November 5, November 19, December 3, and December 17, 2024 at our regular time of 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET. Event page
• 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon - register now

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Papers
  • Are Wikipedia articles representative of Western or world knowledge?, December 12, 2024, The Signpost
  • Baptiste de Coulon, "Les don­nées liées, Wikidata et les archi­ves : une oppor­tu­nité de contri­bu­tion aux com­muns numé­riques". In: La Gazette des archives, n°271, 2024-2, p.37-56 (free access online after 3 years).
• Videos: AWS re:Invent 2024 - Wikimedia Deutschland's Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) and Philippe Saadé talk about d:Wikidata:Embedding Project.

Tool of the week

• Tabular Online Validator - checks if SPARQL query results conform to a provided schema by validating data and highlighting potential errors, such as missing properties, invalid values, or too many values, with the option to refine the schema if issues arise. (A major update to the current ShEx validator that is expected to get integrated into the existing validator soon)
• CAT🐈: Overview if references: looking at references for a set of Wikidata items

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Now Hiring: OpenRefine Developer & Contributor Engagement
• The Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) is launching the Entity Management Cooperative (EMCO) program in 2025, aiming to unify entity management across the semantic web, including registries like Wikidata. Volunteers, including those with prior experience in PCC’s ISNI or Wikidata pilots, are invited to join the Early Adopters Phase by January 17, 2025.
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library Working Group has set up a page on Meta to coordinate contributions across projects, including Wikidata

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • bequest income (the sum a organisations receives from bequests/legacies in a timeframe)
• Newest External identifiers: PCGames.de product ID, PUG authority ID, Three Decks class ID, Vidas author ID, Usito ID, ZSL authority ID, Collectie Nederland ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
  • nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of non-profit organisations)
  • Рахимов, Гафур Рахимович (Gʻafur Rahimov)
  • nomenclatural type of (taxon item of wich this item is the taxonomic type)
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Three Decks conflict ID, Algeria Press Service tag ID (French), Algeria Press Service tag ID (English), Algeria Press Service tag ID (Arabic), JudaicaLink person ID, Newmark Albanian-English Dictionary ID, Norsk oversettterleksikon ID, footballdatabase.eu match ID, Kamus Pelajar Edisi Kedua ID, Berlinische Galerie object ID, Singapore Unique Entity Number, Lyricfind artist ID, HonestGamers game ID, identifiant MACM d'un artisite, Syrian Memory person ID, Identifiant d'un(e) auteurice sur le site Mille ans de littérature d'oc, Paris Match ID, Kamus Dewan Edisi Tiga, identifiant Registre national des gels, DOSBox Wiki, Identifiant Cimetières de France

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • World map of recent censuses known at Wikidata for each decade (select decade on the right side)
  • Timeline of inception of Ghanaian universities
  • Most common name in Germany by year of birth
• WikiProject Highlights:
  • Chemistry/Elements
  • Taiwan/Truku - a compilation of information on the subject of Taroko culture, including statistics and records of activities.
• Newest database reports: Dagbani Lexemes with Glosses which are the same as the Lemma
• Showcase Items: Alice Through the Looking Glass (Q17485699) - 2016 film directed by James Bobin where now 22-year-old Alice comes across a magical looking glass that takes her back to Wonderland.
• Showcase Lexemes: آب‌لرزه‌یاب (L744998) - Persian noun, translates to "hydro-seismometer"

Development

• Wikibase REST API: We prototyped search support for the REST API and would like your feedback on it.
• Property Suggestions: We updated the underlying data so you should have more up-to-date suggestions again when making new statements.
• EntitySchemas: We continued the work on making it possible to search for EntitySchemas by their label and aliases when linking to them in a statement.
• Query Service: We are investigating if we can do something about the issue where not all edgeLabels are shown on a graph visualisation (phab:T381857) and if there are any alternatives to the library used for the graph builder in the Query Service (phab:T381764)
• Under the hood: We are optimizing the server setup for the term store to accommodate its growth (phab:T351802)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) (talk) · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:57, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

Tech News: 2024-51

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

• Interested in improving event management on your home wiki? The CampaignEvents extension offers organizers features like event registration management, event/wikiproject promotion, finding potential participants, and more - all directly on-wiki. If you are an organizer or think your community would benefit from this extension, start a discussion to enable it on your wiki today. To learn more about how to enable this extension on your wiki, visit the deployment status page.

Updates for editors

• Users of the iOS Wikipedia App in Italy and Mexico on the Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedias, can see a personalized Year in Review with insights based on their reading and editing history.
• Users of the Android Wikipedia App in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia can see the new Rabbit Holes feature. This feature shows a suggested search term in the Search bar based on the current article being viewed, and a suggested reading list generated from the user’s last two visited articles.
• The global reminder bot is now active and running on nearly 800 wikis. This service reminds most users holding temporary rights when they are about to expire, so that they can renew should they want to. See the technical details page for more information.
• The next issue of Tech News will be sent out on 13 January 2025 because of the end of year holidays. Thank you to all of the translators, and people who submitted content or feedback, this year.
• View all 27 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the Android Wikipedia App which had caused translatable SVG images to show the wrong language when they were tapped.

Updates for technical contributors

• There is no new MediaWiki version next week. The next deployments will start on 14 January. [1]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

MediaWiki message delivery 22:22, 16 December 2024 (UTC)

New pages patrol January 2025 Backlog drive

January 2025 Backlog Drive | New pages patrol
On 1 January 2025, a one-month backlog drive for new pages patrol will begin in hopes of addressing the growing backlog. Barnstars will be awarded based on the number of articles and redirects patrolled. Each article review will earn 1 point, while each redirect review will earn 0.2 points. Streak awards will be given out based on consistently hitting point thresholds for each week of the drive. Barnstars will also be granted for re-reviewing articles previously reviewed by other patrollers during the drive. Interested in taking part? Sign up here.
You're receiving this message because you are a new page patroller. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself here.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 01:53, 18 December 2024 (UTC)

RFC: Rating of the 2005 Birmingham tornado

There is an ongoing RFC to determine which source should be used for the rating of the 2005 Birmingham tornado. You can participate in the discussion here: Talk:2005 Birmingham tornado#Should the article’s infobox indicate EF2/T4 or F3/T5-6?. As a note, you are receiving this alert as according to Wikipedia’s XTools, you are one of the top 10 editors for the article. The Weather Event Writer (Talk Page) 03:46, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikimedia Apps newsletter – Fourth quarter of 2024

Hello, and welcome to the app's final newsletter of 2024! In this edition, we’ll highlight the key updates and progress made during October and November 2024!

iOS Updates

Personalized Wikipedia Year in Review

In November, we released the first iteration of the Personalized Wikipedia Year in Review to users in Italy and Mexico, covering Italian, Spanish, and English Wikipedia! This experimental feature offers personalized insights based on reading, editing, and donation history for iOS app users for 2024. If this initial version is successful, we hope to improve upon it and make it available to everyone within the iOS app in January 2025. For more information on how your data is used and how to access your Year in Review, please visit the project page, or watch a short video demonstration of the feature.

Alt Text Experiment

The alternative text experiment concluded on November 4, and we are currently analyzing the results. The edits are being reviewed by accessibility experts and moderators active on the iOS app for additional feedback.

Preliminary results show that prompting users on an image they’ve just added leads to higher completion rates (18%) compared to unrelated images (6%). The overall revert rate for alt text edits was 3.4%, lower than the app’s average revert rate of 8.1%. We’ll decide next steps for this feature after completing the analysis.

Navigation Refresh

We completed the first phase of our Navigation refresh, and released a new profile menu into the production version of the app. Our work was coordinated in this Epic: T373714

Android Updates

Private Donor Recognition Experiment

We launched an experiment in France and the Netherlands, exploring the impact of private donor recognition on current and prospective donors. Users who donated through the app will see an active badge on the contributions page, while those who haven’t donated will see a prompt to do so. The experiment will run for 20 days, after which we will evaluate the results. This work was coordinated under Epic: T376303.

Rabbit Holes Experiment

The team began work on the "Rabbit Holes" experiment to increase retention among new readers. The experiment is designed to help users more easily discover and connect with content they are interested in. It is being coordinated under Epic: T378612.

Recommended Content in Search

The Recommended Content in Search experiment showed promising results. Personalized recommendations led to higher retention (86.5%) compared to non-personalized recommendations (64.9%), with positive feedback from users.

Places

We added a launcher shortcut for quicker access to the "Places" feature in the app. (T375367)

Looking Ahead

As we close out 2024, we’re excited about all the progress made and the work ahead in 2025. Keep an eye out for more updates and improvements we hope will enhance your Wikipedia experience!

Thank you for being part of this journey, and don’t forget to subscribe to the newsletter for the latest updates!

-- ARamadan-WMF 13:54, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

December thanks

story · music · places

Thank you today for improving article quality in December! - One the long travel parts on the most recent extreme trip (see places), I had time to look at my pages on mobiles, and didn't like it ;) - Take {{User QAIbox}}. Here, the frame has even width all around. On mobile, the gray fills the screen to left and right, which looks strange for small pics, - could that be changed somehow in the template? - Today is a woman poet's centenary. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 16:43, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #659

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata in the
week leading up to 2024-12-23. Missed the previous one? See issue #658

Discussions

• New request for comments:
  • P518 scope - Should scope of league or competition (P118) include forms and aspects?
  • Trying to get a consensus on English label for Q30 -- "United States of America" vs "United States"

Events

• Ongoing: Wikidata Cleanup 2024 - Romaine continues his initiative, "Wikidata Cleanup," to coordinate community efforts in addressing the problem of items missing basic properties during the last ten days of 2024, when many users have extra time due to holidays. The aim is to improve data quality by focusing on ensuring all items have essential properties like "instance of" (P31) or "subclass of" (P279), adding relevant country and location data, and maintaining consistency within item series.
• Upcoming events: Data Reuse Days - online event focusing on projects using Wikidata's data, 18-27 February 2025. You can submit a proposal for the program on the talk page until January 12th.

Press, articles, blog posts, videos

• Blogs
  • Exploring YouTube Channels Via Wikidata, by Tara Calishain. "This time I'm playing with a way to browse YouTube channels while using Wikidata as context. And you can try it too, because it doesn't need any API keys!"
  • Wikidata Items "described at URL" domain ranked list, by Magnus Manske
• Papers: Finding Female Film Editors in Wikidata: How to Query and Visualize Filmographic Records
• Videos: How to link a Wikipedia article to Wikidata (Spanish)

Tool of the week

• Flying Dehyphenator is an Ordia game. Given the start part of a word, use the spacebar to move the word and hit the next part of the word. Only hyphenations described with the Unicode hyphenation character work.
• Want a wrap of your Wikidata activities in 2024? Wiki Year In Review has it for you! (use www.wikidata.org for the project URL)

Other Noteworthy Stuff

• Wikibase/Suite-Contributing-Guide: Wikibase Suite's contributing guide has been published. This guide aims to help anyone who wants to contribute and make sure they are equipped with all the relevant information to do so.

Newest properties and property proposals to review

• Newest General datatypes:
  • bequest income (the sum a organisations receives from bequests/legacies in a timeframe)
  • taxon known by this common name (taxon item of which this common name refers)
  • homonymous taxon (taxon item of which the taxon name is an exact homonym)
  • role named as (use as qualifier to indicate how the object's role was named in the credits of its respective work)
  • meeting of (subject is a meeting or session of this organization)
• Newest External identifiers: PCGames.de product ID, PUG authority ID, Three Decks class ID, Vidas author ID, Usito ID, ZSL authority ID, Collectie Nederland ID, Hachette author ID, CamerounWeb person ID, Hindi Shabdamitra entry ID, OpenSSF Practices ID, Japanese Health Insurance System Facility ID, Centre d'Etudes Picasso ID, CUATM statistical code, CUATM unique identification code, JudaicaLink person (GND) ID, teams.by national team ID, Eyrolles author ID, Mémoire des avocats ID, BCU Kirundi-English Dictionary ID, Estonian–Latvian Dictionary ID, WHL player ID, Indo-European Lexicon ID, Battle.net game ID
• New General datatypes property proposals to review:
  • About box (Screenshot of the About Box of the respective software (contains important information such as authors, license, version number and year(s) and is included in almost every software))
  • nonprofit tax status (country specific tax status of organisations like non-profits)
  • nomenclatural type of (taxon item of wich this item is the taxonomic type)
  • World Heritage type (Propriety of World heritage site : the Type (Cultural, Natural, Mixed))
  • DVD region code (DVD release is restricted to region code)
  • number of shading units (Number of shading units in a graphics card.)
  • Archaeological National Register code (identifier of elements of the National archaeological register of Moldova)
  • presented works (works of art performed, displayed or presented at a given event)
  • identifiant REGAFI ()
• New External identifier property proposals to review: Three Decks conflict ID, Algeria Press Service tag ID (French), Algeria Press Service tag ID (English), Algeria Press Service tag ID (Arabic), Newmark Albanian-English Dictionary ID, Norsk oversettterleksikon ID, footballdatabase.eu match ID, Kamus Pelajar Edisi Kedua ID, Berlinische Galerie object ID, Singapore Unique Entity Number, Lyricfind artist ID, HonestGamers game ID, identifiant MACM d'un artisite, Syrian Memory person ID, Identifiant d'un(e) auteurice sur le site Mille ans de littérature d'oc, Paris Match ID, Kamus Dewan Edisi Tiga, identifiant Registre national des gels, DOSBox Wiki, Identifiant Cimetières de France, Ech-Chaab tag ID, Amsterdam Monumentenstad ID, Kyiv Independent Topic, Lutris company ID, Shamela Algeria person ID, enterprise number (Germany), Ohio University ArchivesSpace Subject ID, Progetto Euploos ID, Nafziger Order of Battle ID, National Football Teams.com stadium ID, Play:Right genre ID, DataGov dataset, ERR keyword ID, Comprehensive Historical Dictionary of Ladino entry ID, Ohio University ArchivesSpace Agent ID, Russian Football National League player ID, Gaia ID, Inventory of Natural Heritage site ID, Inventory of Natural Heritage tree ID, Wellcome Collection concept ID

You can comment on all open property proposals!

Did you know?

• Query examples:
  • Countries that have had a woman serving as Minister of Defense
  • Leonardo DiCaprio's partners (source)
  • Countries that have most items with Mastodon or PeerTube (ActivityPub) social networks (source)
  • Olympians who died during the year 2024 (source)
• WikiProject Highlights: Nonprofit Organizations/Japan
• Newest database reports: Items with a sitelink to Dutch Wikipedia and have no P31 and/or P279 (source) (replace 2x the "nl" into the language code of your language)
• Showcase Items: Boeing (Q66) - American global aerospace and defense corporation
• Showcase Lexemes: julehilsen - Christmas greeting in Danish

Development

• With the winter holidays upon us, the development team is taking a break, and there will be no deployments for Wikidata during this time.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Weekly Tasks

• Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
• Contribute to the showcase Item and Lexeme above.
• Govdirectory weekly focus country:
• Summarize your WikiProject's ongoing activities in one or two sentences.
• Help translate or proofread the interface and documentation pages, in your own language!
• Help merge identical items across Wikimedia projects.
• Help write the next summary!

· Previous issue · Mohammed Abdulai (WMDE) (talk) · MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:01, 23 December 2024 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 December 2024

• News and notes: Responsibilities and liabilities as a "Very Large Online Platform"

• Op-ed: Beeblebrox on Wikipediocracy, the Committee, and everything

• Opinion: Graham87 on being the first-ever administrator recall subject

• In the media: Delhi High Court considers Caravan and Ken for evaluating the ANI vs. WMF case

• From the archives: Where to draw the line in reporting?

• Recent research: "Wikipedia editors are quite prosocial", but those motivated by "social image" may put quantity over quality

• Humour: Backlash over Santa Claus' Wikipedia article intensifies

• Gallery: A feast of holidays and carols

• Traffic report: Was a long and dark December

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:02, 25 December 2024 (UTC)